Talk:2016 United States presidential election in Oklahoma

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Oklahoma Low‑importance

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Opinions and original research[edit]

I've said this a number of times in places, for example Talk:United States presidential election in Florida, 2016#The Analysis section is filled with NOR flags. Read WP:SYNTH and WP:FRANKIE for the policies and guidelines behind this. It isn't enough to make statements that are easily verifiable in the election data, for example " Hillary Clinton's vote percentage of 28.9% is the worst for a Democratic candidate in Oklahoma since George McGovern's 24% in the 1972 election." Why did an editor choose that particular statistic? It it fair to compare her to all Democratic candidates? Perhaps she should only be compared with Democrats who have held national office. Or only with elections since 1984. Why is her performance only being compared with Democrats and not other parties? All of these choices may seem obvious but there are an infinite number of things you can say about a large data set, if you pick and choose carefully enough. You can make a candidate's performance seem brilliant, or terrible, or mediocre. All of this is prohibited by the policy WP:UNDUE: we can't pick out a single fact and spotlight it on our own initiative.

It bears repeating that most of these observations are unsurprising conventional wisdom. For most of them, you can easily find experts who have made an analysis like this -- which is all the more reason why there is no excuse for not citing these experts and attributing the opinions to them. On the other hand, if you scour the earth and can't find an single election observer who said Clinton's 28.9% is the lowest since 1972, then maybe that means it doesn't belong in a neutral encyclopedia. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 01:49, 5 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]